The brass bell above the front door rang with a cheerful chime, announcing a woman clutching a crumpled list of gardening instructions. I wiped my hands on my canvas apron and smiled across the wooden counter, ready to play the friendly neighborhood botanist. Outside, the city traffic hummed along in the afternoon sun, a comforting wall of normal noise that kept my other life feeling very far away. I had spent the morning sorting through imported seeds, arranging them by germination rate and odd color variations. Nobody walking past the window would ever guess what my throne looked like down in the dark.
“I need something that combines a winter squash with a wild blackberry,” the woman said, slapping three heavy glass jars onto the counter as payment. “My uncle swears he can grow a pie that grows itself if I get the splicing right.”
“That sounds like an ambitious dessert project,” I said, lifting the jars to check the consistency of the payment. The monster blood sloshed against the glass, dark and thick enough to satisfy my requirement for expensive custom work. I reached under the counter to pull out my tray of tweezers and small clay pots.
I grabbed a handful of dried squash seeds and a handful of deep purple berry kernels from my labeled drawers. Working quickly with my fingernails, I nicked the outer hulls of both and pressed them together into a single bed of damp peat moss. It took me a couple of minutes to combine their genetic material using a touch of focused magic hidden inside a drop of water. I sealed the new seed in a tiny foil packet and tossed it into my tin box with the rest.
“Plant this in sandy soil and water it twice a week,” I told her, sliding the foil packet across the counter. “And keep it away from direct frost until the vines take root.”
She grabbed the packet and hurried out without a word, leaving me alone with the jars of monster blood. I tucked the jars into the lower cabinet beside my ledger, making sure the lock clicked firmly into place. Keeping the seeds of every new combine was a habit I refused to break, just in case someone wanted a repeat order.
The bell rang again almost immediately, this time for a man wearing a heavy woolen coat despite the warm weather. He dropped a bundle of raw silver coins and a strange, pulsating organ on the counter. “I want a rose that blooms in solid crystal,” he rasped, tapping the counter with a scarred finger.
“Crystalline petals require a very specific mineral base,” I said, keeping my voice light and professional. I reached into a glass jar filled with crushed quartz dust and pulled out a handful of dormant fern spores. I pressed the spores into the dust, letting my warmth activate the slow, hardening process until the edges of the tiny green specks began to glitter. After two minutes of careful breathing and quiet concentration, I handed him a single bulb encased in hard glass.
“Don’t let it touch iron,” I warned him, pocketing the silver and sliding the monster blood into my collection. He grunted his thanks and vanished into the crowd before I could wipe the quartz dust off my palms.
The afternoon dragged on through a parade of increasingly bizarre demands from people who thought plant biology was a magic trick. One client wanted a root vegetable that tasted like roasted garlic and smoked salt all at once. Another begged for a weeping willow that dropped glowing blue tears instead of ordinary dew. I spent ten minutes fusing nightshade and citrus just to satisfy a strange fellow who insisted on growing sour poison berries.
I kept the seeds of every new combine in my wooden ledger box, organized by date and potential lethality. By late afternoon, my apron was stained with green sap and red berry juice from my hurried work. I paused to sweep up a pile of discarded leaves, welcoming the mindless physical labor that kept my mind off the court waiting for me below.
The bell chimed with a high, melodic note that sounded entirely different from the usual heavy clatter of my afternoon visitors. I looked up from my wooden workbench, my fingers hovering over a tray of damp soil. A male elf stood just inside the doorway, draped in elaborate attire woven from silver threads and pale green leaves.
He carried the natural scent of spring meadows into the cramped shop, pushing aside the smell of wet dirt and fertilizer. I froze as the air shifted between us, my vampire instincts snapping to attention inside my chest. Instead of the usual burning hunger that accompanied the proximity of high-born magical blood, a strange and heavy warmth flooded my veins. He stepped closer to the counter, his light green hair catching the afternoon sun as he tilted his head. “I was told you make plants that defy ordinary rules,” he said, his voice carrying the crispness of a forest breeze.
I kept my weight balanced on the balls of my feet, my fingernails still grey from potting soil, while he looked around the narrow shop with unhurried curiosity. A ray of late afternoon light caught the fine silver embroidery on his shoulder, turning the thread into tiny mirrored lines of fire. Most visitors arrived with panic in their pockets or wild demands for immediate miracles, but he moved like someone who had never rushed a day in his long, tedious life. My fangs ached against the back of my lips, a dull and persistent throb that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the way he breathed.
“What kind of rules?” I asked, leaning my palms against the scarred timber of the counter to keep from fidgeting with my apron strings.
“The sort that keep things from dying when they ought to,” Levin said, stepping closer until the counter was the only thing standing between us. He reached out with long, pale fingers, tapping a knuckle against the rim of a terracotta pot containing a stubborn little fern. “I was told you possess a very particular green thumb, and an even more particular discretion regarding what you grow.”
“Discretion costs extra,” I told him, forcing a merchant’s smile onto my face even though my heart was doing strange, irregular turns behind my ribs. “And most people who talk about defying the rules usually mean they want something illegal or explosive. Which one is it today?”
He didn’t smile back, but the corner of his left eye crinkled in a way that made my chest tighten in alarm. “Neither, though I appreciate an honest shopkeeper. I need something that can root in absolute darkness and still draw enough light to feed a starving colony.”
That sentence dropped into the quiet space between us like a lead weight. Colony was a word elves used for their remote mountain settlements, but it was also the exact term my court officials used when they wanted to talk about the underground holding cells. I narrowed my eyes, letting the professional warmth drop away just enough for the edge of my real self to show through. “We don’t usually take orders for colonies. Most people just want a single pot for a windowsill.”
“I am not most people,” he murmured, leaning over the counter so the scent of damp moss and clover washed completely over me. “And I am willing to pay in something far more interesting than silver or ordinary monster blood.”
My pulse gave a hard, painful kick at the mention of blood, though I kept my face entirely still. Nobody outside my inner court knew what I charged for my custom work, and very few knew what I did with the spoils in the dark hours after closing time. “You talk too much for a casual browser,” I said, my voice dropping an octave into that cool, flat register I used when I sat upon the basalt throne below. “State your price or leave the shop before I lock the door.”
Levin didn’t flinch at the sudden shift in tone, which annoyed me far more than it should have. Instead, he reached into the deep pocket of his emerald tunic and pulled out a small, stoppered vial made of dark, unpolished obsidian. He set it down on the wood between us with a soft, dull click that echoed loudly in the small room. A pale, golden luminescence pulsed from inside the glass, casting long, twisting shadows across his fingers.
“Phoenix tears,” he said softly, watching me closely to see if I would recognize the rarity of the offering. “Gathered from the ash of the eastern peak. It will fix whatever stubborn genetic flaw you are trying to breed out of your subterranean garden.”
The room seemed to shrink around us until there was nothing left in the world except the amber glow of that tiny vial. For months, I had tried every combination of troll bile and wyvern plasma to stabilize the synthetic blood supply, and every single batch had curdled into useless gray sludge within an hour. Here, sitting on my dusty counter, was the exact catalyst I needed to save my people from their own slaughter. I looked from the vial up to his bright green eyes, realizing with a sudden, sinking dread that he knew far too much about my secrets.
“You have three seconds to explain how you know what I keep in my basement,” I whispered, my hand sliding slowly toward the heavy iron shears resting beneath the counter.